This application is based upon and claims the benefit of priority from the prior Japanese Patent Application No. 2001-084994, filed Mar. 23, 2001, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a communication terminal such as a personal computer, PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), or mobile phone, and more particularly to an information communication terminal with the function of receiving electronic mail.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, more and more terminal devices with an electronic mail transmitting/receiving function have been developed way into not only the field of wireline information communication terminals, such as personal computers, but also the field of mobile communication terminals, such as mobile phone terminals and PDAs. This type of terminal is usually provided with a phone book. In the phone book, identification information of the terminals with other parties is registered. Use of the phone book enables electronic mail to be transmitted or received efficiently.
Generally, the registering of the identification information in the phone book is effected by starting a phone book registering program and inputting identification information through the user""s key input operation. The identification information including the name, mail address, and telephone number of the other party. Thus, it takes a lot of time and effort to enter all of such pieces of information through key input operations. Since a small-sized communication terminal device such as a mobile phone terminal has a small key input section, the user has difficulty in operating it and therefore is liable to enter the wrong data.
To overcome such problems, an attempt has been recently made to enable a mobile communication terminal to register information in the phone book by making use of the sender identification information included in a received mail. With this type of registering method, however, a plurality of information elements, including the source address and the telephone number of the sending user (callback telephone number), contained in the received mail are displayed separately. Then, each of the displayed information elements is subjected to a specific save operation, thereby registering the currently displayed information element in the phone book. Therefore, registering all of the information elements requires the display screens to be changed each time a different information element is subjected to a specific save operation. As a result, the save operations have been a troublesome job in this registering method.
It is accordingly an object of the present invention to provide a communication terminal apparatus which enables identification information about the other party to be registered in its phone book easily in a shorter time.
According to an aspect of the present invention, there is provided an information communication terminal comprising: a phone book; a mail receiving section configured to receive electronic mail which includes a plurality of informations corresponding to sender of the electronic mail; an extracting section configured to extract the plurality of informations from the electronic mail received by the mail receiving section; and a registration controller configured to register the plurality of informations extracted by the extracting section in the phone book simultaneously in one operation by the user.
Additional objects and advantages of the invention will be set forth in the description which follows, and in part will be obvious from the description, or may be learned by practice of the invention. The objects and advantages of the invention may be realized and obtained by means of the instrumentalities and combinations particularly pointed out hereinafter.